November152012

Public Banking Institute President,
Ellen Brown, opens the first Public Banking In America Conference in
Philadelphia on April 27, 2012, followed by keynote speaker, political
economist, Gar Alperovitz.

April132012

American Holocaust: The Destruction of
America's Native Peoples, a lecture by David Stannard, professor and
chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Hawaii.
Stannard, author of American Holocaust, asserts that the European and
white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the
most substantial act of genocide in world history. A combination of
atrocities and imported plagues resulted in the death of roughly 95
percent of the native population in the Americas. Stannard argues that
the perpetrators of the American Holocaust operated from the same
ideological source as the architects of the Nazi Holocaust. That
ideology remains alive today in American foreign policy, Stannard avers.

The 31st Annual Vanderbilt University Holocaust Lecture Series,
the longest continuous Holocaust lecture series at an American
university, takes the theme this year of (over) Sites of Memory and
examines places that are infused with memories of genocide and the
challenge to find effective ways to honor these memories.

April032012

Chris Mooney, Host of Post of Inquiry,
discusses motivated reasoning and the "Smart Idiots" effect: he rebuts
the conventional wisdom that if you put good information and argument
out there and teach the public how to critically think, they will have a
clearer idea of what is "truth." More education actually leads to
higher degree of partisan beliefs. Arguing for facts alone does not
help; more education is not the key: the public denies science not
necessarily because they are uneducated but because they think "their"
science is better.

March202012

Evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen made this t-shirt design in support of the Elsevier boycott.

Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott
by 8,209 researchers (and counting) is seeking to set it free…well,
more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher
of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its
aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by
Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act (RWA). Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy
enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted
the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research.
Now, only a month after SOPA and PIPA were defeated thanks to the wave
of online protests, the boycotting researchers can chalk up their first
win: Elsevier has withdrawn its support of the RWA, although the company downplayed the role of the boycott in its decision, and the oversight committee killed it right away.

But the fight for open access is just getting started.

Seem dramatic? Well, here’s a little test. Go to any of the top
academic journals in the world and try to read an article. The full
article, mind you…not just the abstract or the first few paragraphs. Hit
a paywall? Try an article written 20 or 30 years ago in an obscure
journal. Just look up something on PubMed then head to JSTOR where a
vast archive of journals have been digitized for reference. Denied? Not
interested in paying $40 to the publisher to rent the article for a few
days or purchase it for hundreds of dollars either? You’ve just logged
one of the over 150 million failed attempts per year to access an article on JSTOR.
Now consider the fact that the majority of scientific articles in the
U.S., for example, has been funded by government-funded agencies, such
as the National Science Foundation, NIH, Department of Defense,
Department of Energy, NASA, and so on. So while taxpayer money has
fueled this research, publishers charge anyone who wants to actually see
the results for themselves, including the authors of the articles.

Paying a high price for academic journals isn’t anything new, but the
events that unfolded surrounding the RWA was the straw that broke the
camel’s back. It began last December when the RWA was submitted to
Congress. About a month later, Timothy Gowers, a mathematics professor
at Cambridge University, posted
rather innocently to his primarily mathematics-interested audience his
particular problems with Elsevier, citing exorbitant prices and forcing
libraries to purchase journal bundles rather than individual titles. But
clearly, it was Elsevier’s support of the RWA that was his call to
action. Two days later, he launched the boycott of Elsevier at thecostofknowledge.com, calling upon his fellow academics to refuse to work with the publisher in any capacity.

Seemingly right out of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, researchers started taking a stand in droves. And the boycott of Elsevier continues on, though with less gusto now that the RWA is dead.
It’s important to point out though that the boycott is not aimed at
forcing Elsevier to make the journals free, but protesting the way it
does its business and the fact that it has profits four times larger than related publishers. The Statement of Purpose
for the protest indicates that the specific issues that researchers
have with Elsevier varies, but “…what all the signatories do agree on is
that Elsevier is an exemplar of everything that is wrong with the
current system of commercial publication of mathematics journals.”

The advantages of open access to researchers have been known for some time, but its popularity has struggled.

It’s clear that all forms of print media, including newspapers, magazines, and books, are in a crisis in the digital era (remember Borders closing?).
The modern accepted notion that information should be free has
crippled publishers and many simply waited too long to evolve into new
pay models. When academic journals went digital, they locked up access
behind paywalls or tried to sell individual articles
at ridiculous prices. Academic research is the definition of premium,
timely content and prices reflected an incredibly small customer base
(scientific researchers around the globe) who desperately needed the
content as soon as humanly possible. Hence, prices were set high enough
that libraries with budgets remained the primary customers, until of
course library budgets got slashed, but academics vying for tenure,
grants, relevance, or prestige continued to publish in these same
journals. After all, where else could they turn…that is, besides the Public Library of Science (PLoS) project?

In all fairness, some journals get it. The Open Directory maintains a list of journals that switched
from paywalls to open access or are experimenting with alternative
models. Odds are very high that this list will continue to grow, but how
fast? And more importantly, will the Elsevier boycott empower
researchers to get on-board the open access paradigm, even if it meant
having to reestablish themselves in an entirely new ecosystem of
journals?

As the numbers of dissenting researchers continue to climb, calls for open access to research are translating into new legislation…and the expected opposition.
But let’s hope that some are thinking about breaking free from the
journal model altogether and discovering creative, innovative ways to
get their research findings out there, like e-books or apps that would
make the research compelling and interactive. Isn’t it about time
researchers took back control of their work?

If you are passionate about the issue of open access to research,
you’ll want to grab a cup of coffee and nestle in for this Research
Without Borders video from Columbia University, which really captures
the challenge of transition from the old publishing model to the new
digital world:

March182012

http://www.ted.com
Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest
problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where
they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New
Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to
the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about
teaching.

March162012

Yochai Benkler tells four stories of how
misinformation spreads, and is corrected (sometimes), online: the story
of how the agenda around Wikileaks was set; the story of a national
broadband strategy influenced by industry; the story of Obama's $200
million/day trip to India; and the story of a bipartisan internet piracy
bill that took a left turn when the public got wind.

February212012

This week the Berkman Center and the Research Center
for Information Law, St. Gallen released the latest study on the state
of interoperability: “Breaking Down Digital Barriers.” This joint report follows the Roadmap to Open ICT Ecosystems
released in 2005, as it navigates the nuanced territory of consumer,
corporate, and governmental interests in the benefits and roadblocks to
interoperable ICT systems.

The report and accompanying case studies on DRM-protected music, Digital Identity, and Mashups are available for download on the project website. The presentation and discussion of the report and its findings, took place in Washington, DC. Runtime: 01:04:20

February192012

Abstract: What is education for democracy? We urgently need to
reflect about this, since radical changes in education are occurring
without much public deliberation. Narrowly focusing on national economic
gain, nations, and their systems of education, are needlessly
discarding skills associated with the humanities and the arts, that are
needed to keep democracies alive: the ability to think critically; the
ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a
"citizen of the world"; and the ability to imagine sympathetically the
predicament of another person.

Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and
Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and
Divinity School. She is an Associate in the Classics Department and the
Political Science Department, a Member of the Committee on Southern
Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She is
the founder and Coordinator of the Center for Comparative
Constitutionalism.

Her publications include the recently released From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010), Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011). Her current book in progress is Political Emotions: The Public Psychology of a Decent Society.

January282012

Economics Professor Richard Wolff
details the problems of capitalism and urges our recognizing its
obsolescence and replacing it with institutions that truly serve the
people.Talk at Church of All Souls in New York City, January 24, 2012. Camera, audio: Joe Friendly

January192012

The explosion of open education content resources and
freely available collaboration and media production platforms represents
one of the most exciting emerging trends in education. These tools
create unprecedented opportunities for teachers to design and
personalize curriculum and to give students opportunities to
collaborate, publish, and take responsibility for their own learning.
Many education technology and open education advocates hope that the
widespread availability of free resources and platforms will
disproportionately benefit disadvantaged students, by making technology
resources broadly available that were once only available to affluent
students. It is possible, however, that affluent schools and students
have a greater capacity to take up new innovations, even free ones, and
so new tools and resources that appear in the ecology of education will
widen rather than ameliorate digital divides. In this presentation, we
will examine evidence for both the "tech as equalizer" and "tech as
accelerator of digital divides" hypotheses, and we will examine
technology innovations and interventions that specifically target
learners with the most needs. A lively discussion will follow to
consider how educators, technologists, and policymakers can address
issues of educational digital inequalities in their work. An
introduction to these issues can be found in this video op-ed.

January172012

In this Tedx talk, David Chipperfield of David Chipperfield Architects was invited to discuss the distrust that people feel about architecture, from a practitioners point of view, with the seductively titled talk: Why does everyone hate modern...

January052012

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, hackers looked at each other and said : “w00t! Only two days to go until 28c3″.

The Chaos Communications Congress is the annual meetup of Germany's Chaos Computer Club, one of the oldest hacker collectives in the world. It takes place in Berlin every year at the height of the holiday season between Christmas and New Year's Eve, a time when only the dedicated European computer obsessive would leave their family and friends to spend four days in a conference centre with like-minded hackers and geeks.

The programme mixes technical talks from the security and free software worlds with talks about online rights and hacktivism, and is well known for breaking new issues that go on to be important in the wider world. Alongside the talks are space for Europe's computer clubs and hackspaces to demonstrate their current projects, as well as break out spaces for workshopping new tools and projects, and labs offering introductions to things like Arduino-based electronics, 3D printing and even lock-picking.

This year was the 28th Chaos Communications Congress (28c3 for short) and my third time going. Here are my highlights.

Roger Dingledine and Jacob Applebaum on TOR

For me, this talk illustrates the central role the hacker community is now playing in world events. The conference opened with a set piece from Evgeny Morozov on the perils of networked, digital surveillance, but it was this talk on Day 2 about the experiences of the TOR community with national network control infrastructures that felt like it united people at 28c3 against surveillance as a concept and a technology, in free societies as well as oppressed ones. The tub-thumping and the casual allusions to the technical vulnerabilities of state censorship technologies were tempered by the pair's obvious expertise and considered ethical attitude. Gold.

Defending mobile phones

Two years ago, at 26c3, Karsten Nohl announced that the GSM encryption protocol had been cracked. This year, he detailed how network operators should be securing their networks while they upgrade the encryption, and asked the community to help him keep track of how the operators perform. He also previewed a new project, CatcherCatcher, which will track the activity of IMSI catchers on behalf of phone users. IMSI catchers are thought to be increasingly used by law enforcement agencies to track people via their mobile phones.

The coming war on general computation

An expertly delivered talk in which Cory Doctorow reminded congress that “information appliances” (like iPads, Kindles and all the rest) are simply fully functional computers with spyware in them out-of-the-box: “All attempts at controlling PCs converge on rootkits and all attempts at controlling the network converge on surveillance”.

Sovereign keys

Towards a Single Secure European Cyberspace?

A beautifully constructed lecture by Suso Baleato cross-referencing the rhetoric used by European legislators to erode internet freedoms with the character of the new, networked activism which I ruin at the end by asking a stupid question no-one understands.

November122011

Uploaded by theRSAorg on Oct 21, 2011
In
this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist
explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human
behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain
McGilchrist as part of the RSA's free public events programme. To view
the full lecture, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk